So, I'm trying to make cards for a board game using mail merge. I'm not sure if there's a way to do this with mail merge or just a way to do it post merge?

Basically, I have two merge fields on separate lines in the center of my card. I would like to apply a style (specifically, shade the background of the paragraph, including the 1st line) based on the text in the second field. For instance, for every card with the text "AAA" in the second field, I want to shade both the second field and the first field with red in the background, and for every card with "BBB" I would like both fields to be blue, etc. I would need it to be edge to edge of the text area. I was trying to do it post merge with find and replace, but I can't get it to "find" and select the first field along with the second, and thus cant get it to apply the color to the first field. In addition, even when I get it to select the second field only, it only applies to color to the right of the text, and leaves the left side white.

In your IF Field test for the presence of AAA. If present, have your truetext include your AAA field and the text you want. Make sure your IF field's truetext includes the paragraph mark. Format that truetext paragraph with your shading. Then have your falsetext be a separate paragraph with appropriate shading. Again, make sure the paragraph mark is within the falsetext quotation marks.